Ayaan Hirsi Ali has written a remarkable book about her experiences as a Somali Muslim woman in Kenya, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia and the Netherlands (ISBN-13 #978-0743289684, 2007, 368 pages).
Reviewed by Cecil E. Maranville
Infidel is a remarkable book by a remarkable person. It's unusual that someone less than 40 years old would have lived a life worthy of an autobiography, but Ayaan Hirsi Ali certainly has. You might not have heard or remembered her name, but you are likely aware of the brutal murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh in November 2004 at the hands of a radical Muslim. Van Gogh produced an 11-minute documentary titled Submission about the inherent abuse of women in the Islamic faith.
We wrote of the murder and its implications in several articles in World News and Prophecy starting in December 2004. After shooting his victim, then cutting his throat nearly to decapitation, the assassin stabbed a note to van Gogh's chest. The note was a fatwa-like assassination order against the woman who wrote the screenplay—Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Ali was, at the time, a member of the Dutch parliament. Little publicized outside of Holland, subsequent events threw the tiny nation into turmoil and eventually led Ali to write her extraordinary autobiography.
She now lives in the United States, but she came to Holland from Kenya, where she lived with her grandmother, mother and sister as refugees from war-torn Somalia. The family also lived for a time in Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia. She provides an insightful perception of the different approaches to Islam in the indigenous cultures and tribes.
Islam's oppression of women
Principally, Infidel is the story of Islam's effect upon women, told from the point of view of Somalis, where female circumcision is still practiced. Living in Saudi Arabia as a young girl in the 1970s, Ali also offers sharp insights into life as a woman under Islam in the Wahhabi tradition. In Kenya, as a teen, she was drawn to the radical Muslim Brotherhood, learning its violent philosophy from imams sponsored by Egypt and Saudi Arabia. She experienced and witnessed the routine beatings of women and children, as well as the facelessness of a female in the Islamic culture.
